As the bells toll midnight, an ambitious scholar struggles with his impending demise, fearing he may be torn limb from limb by hellish devils; a young prince stands in a working graveyard, a skull in his hand, and ruminates on mortality and the levelling effects of death; a Jewish merchant falls into his own trap, a burning cauldron intended to catch his enemies, thereby becoming the engine of his end; two young lovers lie dead in a tomb, having committed suicide in a fateful pact, testimony to the bitter enmity of their feuding families; a mother-in-law plays a strategic game of chess while her daughter-in-law is knowingly prostituted to the Duke of Florence in an upstairs gallery; a beautiful young widowed Duchess watches a dance of madmen in a prison, a grotesque piece of theatre that prefigures her violent murder; a Moorish general stabs himself to death before Venetian senators in Cyprus having smothered his beautiful young wife in the marital bed; a brother who has committed incest with his sister brings in her heart on a sword as a grim finale to an exotic banquet; an old man accompanied by his Fool and exposed to the elements following the savage rejection of his own family howls in madness as a fierce storm rages…all of these ‘moments’ and more contribute to the making of what we now understand as the remarkable portfolio of early modern tragedy. Their very difference as moments and their startling innovations can tell us much about the richness and sheer inventiveness of the form on the early commercial stages. What my brief descriptions here also indicate is the extent to which these deeply affecting and effective stage ‘moments’ depend on the creation of meaningful stage pictures, icons by which spectators and characters alike make sense of the tragic events unfolding before them.